


Amapola

by Mad_Max



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - England, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Alternate Universe - World War II, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Past Abuse, Period-Typical Homophobia, Religious Guilt, Wartime
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-14
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-22 06:14:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30034305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Max/pseuds/Mad_Max
Summary: As war threatens Britain’s airways, life in the country is more varied and dangerous than anything Credence has experienced yet.
Relationships: Credence Barebone/Newt Scamander, Credence Barebone/Original Percival Graves, Original Percival Graves/Theseus Scamander
Comments: 3
Kudos: 4





	Amapola

_September, 1939._

It had never occurred to Ma, as she made the purchase of his round-trip ticket from London to Swanage and then back again, that the line might be bombed somewhere important en route, leaving Credence stranded. That was his primary thought as he stood in the train station that morning, staring blankly into the bold type-face of the notice tacked to the departures board and drumming his fist against the bony flat of his thigh.

Heart racing, he tried to remember the location of Swanage and its proximity to London on the map of England that Modesty had smuggled along in the pocket of her checkered mac, but, geography being one on a very long list of things in which he had no talents at all, he gave up. He had already asked twice - shyly - at the window if there was any chance of a bus. The woman there had a flat, kind face that managed to look sorry for him even as she laughed and told him to step back, then, sonny, so that she could lock up the grate.

He stood before the line of posters now, scratching his toe into the brick and ignoring the salty whip of the cold down the thin collar of his woolly jersey, considering his options. There weren’t many, by his reckoning. It was frigid for late summer and beginning to rain. Ma expected him back by the following evening. By the following evening and no later, she had said. If he came any later, she’d said, then he would find the doors locked in his face, and it would be no use crying because she would give up on him then, and she would wash her hands of him completely, and he would be free to try and make his own way in the world, for all the good it would do him.

He supposed he could always try and walk up the road until he hit another town, which might have a bus or a farm with a barn or a haystack where he could sleep on his way, like a refugee. Like Christ. He mulled this over. If he walked, it would take weeks. She would never believe him that there had been no other option. She would think that he was lying, like she always did, and because he was always lying, it wouldn’t make any difference to her that this time he might be telling the truth. He shrugged at this mental image of her as he stepped down from the platform. His palms stung like needle pricks, as though in anticipation.

He stayed there for a bit like this, letting the wind and the rain pummel him and sweep the severe line of his sweaty hair across his forehead, until he was sure that he must look, as Ma would have said, like Cane when he came back in from the field after killing Abel.

It would be impossible to walk. Their trip had been a Biblical fifteen hours on the train because of the bombing at Basingstoke, over which they’d been forced to stay in the sweaty box of the train car with the two soldiers on leave who smelled of tobacco and the old lady with the cake and the knitting kit who was making a small pair of socks for a daughter-in-law due to give birth to her second child any day now. Credence hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast the morning of their departure, when Ma had let him drop a heap of sugar into his coffee, as there had been no money for food along the way, just the buttered bread he’d given to Modesty when they’d been laid off in Basingstoke. His stomach was aching now in that stubborn way it had. He rubbed it with his fist, and when that was no use, he took off back down the way he’d come up in the car that afternoon.

This was how the Scamander boy found him an hour later, having tried and failed to read the sign pointing off towards the next town over - _Puh_ _-_ something, with one of the tricky e’s - and having then decided that he would go that way anyway and wandered down the road a stretch with mud in his shoes and his jersey clinging to his skin like wet lime plaster.

You look a deal worse-off than when we left you, Scamander said by way of greeting, blinking through the rain at Credence, who looked back at him as blankly as he had at the incomprehensible jumble of the train posters and the traffic signage before. The line’s been bombed, Scamander said, twisting the handlebar in his fist. My mother sent me to come and collect you, in case you had nowhere else to go. Your little sister’s already rung a neighbour to tell your mother. Said she’d worry.

Scamander, straddling his bike between two firepoker legs, moved just as he’d done at the front door of the stone house, like a small animal which had wandered into the body of a wiry young man and decided to try its luck there. As Credence continued to watch him wordlessly, he stood and gestured the seat of the bike, the luggage rack screwed over the back wheel behind it.

You look light, he said. You’ll have to sit on the rack, though. Have you ever been on a bike?

No.

Well. He pursed his lips as Credence slid gingerly over the designated spot. The bike shifted between their legs. It was lighter than Credence had expected, painted a chipped spring blue, the same colour as the wrinkled mac on the body before him, now shockingly close. Put your arms around my waist, Scamander dictated, and then they were rolling down the lip of the road, the bicycle wheels humming as they picked up speed.

The countryside whipping past was lusher and greener than anything in London, or anything that Credence could remember of New York. That had mostly been tenements, grey and red brick and a lot of noise and smell. Not unlike London, which had witnessed his transition from a miserable youth into miserable adulthood and all of the sin that came attached to it. This place smelled like saltwater, a bodily perfume. Even in the rain. He felt the slick fabric of Scamander’s mac in his palm and shuddered, filled with the smell of him mixed in with the sea-smell all washed away just as quickly by the rain, and the bike shuddering beneath them both, jolted by a loose stone that went skittering out across the road before it was lost to them in their speed.

You’re not holding on, Scamander said, his voice half-shout. We’ve told your mother you’ll be well looked after, so you shouldn’t die on the way, if you can help it.

She’s not my real mother, said Credence before he could stop himself.

What? That’s a funny thing to say.

She isn’t, so.

He wasn’t sure why he was still talking, even as he inched his bottom up the luggage rack and began to cast about for a better place to put his hands, safely distanced from Scamander’s thighs, which jumped up with the motion of pedaling and made the hair on the back of his wrists stand on end. He said: They found me on a bunk in the steerage hull of the _America_. Someone had wrapped me in blankets, but there wasn’t a note.

What, in the hull of a ship?

A steamer ship, said Credence, and even as he said these words, they felt, as they usually did whenever he let himself dwell on them, exotic. He felt that they carried the promise of something in them, something exciting and much larger than Ma. In New York, he said. He rubbed his palm against the sodden fabric covering his knee and shuddered again as Scamander’s back pressed into the same spot. His voice took on a frantic note, struggling to be heard above the din of the rain and the roar of a passing automobile. They were going to give me over to the nuns, but she found me. She was always looking for babies to rescue from them. The nuns. 

Silence for a while after that. Nothing but bike jostle and rain and the occasional scream of a ship’s horn somewhere off shore. If he’d been heard, the message was clear now that he was to be quiet. Or maybe Scamander was only waiting for him to add something else, but there was nothing. Everything that had happened after, with Ma, was a period of trial, like Jacob working for the hand of Rachel, an ever-expanding history of servitude and humiliation that Credence felt suddenly keen to leave behind him. He was out in the country now, and there was no way for him to get to her, or her to him. They rounded a corner. The bike dipped, throwing him closer, his chin into the blue mac.

You’ll have to wrap your arms round me a little tighter, said Scamander, his soft voice almost eaten by the rain. Hang on, all right? It’s not a long way now. My mother wants to feed you. She’ll have your tea on the minute you walk in through the front door.

*

Everything had happened so quickly, it felt to Credence like he lived life as a bead on a long string in perpetual collision, always responding to the next surprise without any time to dwell on it. Most of those first three days would remain a jumble to him of sea-smell and fresh, borrowed clothes and things that otherwise made little sense to him. For example: Swanage was a seaside town; he was encouraged to go outside daily to “take in the view” for no other reason than that it was beautiful, and this should bring him some sort of pleasure, a word as incomprehensible as the lack of work expected of him. On top of that, they were all kind to him without his having done anything to deserve it. 

For example: he was given a warm little attic room in the stone house his first night, when they thought that he might stay on for the week or two at most until the line could be repaired. And there was always breakfast, which always included jam and even egg. Through this, he began to understand that the Scamanders were rich. Modesty’s luck was that she had been shunted off here on the last family in town with spare beds for a child. Credence appreciated the wealth of those days with the taste of salt on the back of his tongue. He knew that he would be back in London soon, alone with Ma. He knew that the line would be repaired. It would be colder there, and he would be hungry again. In anticipation of this future starvation, he started to pack bread and bits of cheese into a haversack. He planned for the day when his luck would end abruptly, planned to be caught off guard.

He couldn’t understand what happened after, only that Mrs. Scamander had spoken with Modesty, who must have told her something awful, because she’d knocked on his door that night and sat down on the edge of his bed and offered him work in her stable and generally around Stone House, which was, he learned, the house’s proper name. And so the circumstances of his life had changed. This would all have been more than bearable if it hadn’t been for their son.

*

There was only once, in all of summer, a parcel from Ma. In it: Modesty’s winter jumper and the Bible Credence had left behind, a note about Christian duty and obedience, and a leather belt.

At the urging of his hosts, he wore only his braces now and a pair of patched trousers from Newt, rubber boots from another brother in service, his old jersey and a jumper from Mrs. Scamander herself, who promised him that it looked handsome on his narrow frame and not at all like a lady’s item. In the kitchen, the belt buckle hanging from his hand swung heavy like the head of a dead snake. He felt it drag his insides out with it, through the palm of his hand. For the first time since he’d come here, the old terror, the cold all over his body. The repair of the bombed line some days before had gone unremarked by any of the Scamanders. His old return ticket lie unexchanged in the toe of his church shoes. 

He tucked the belt deep into the bottom of the cupboard, shut its door, and went back out to the stable, where Newt, ready with a shovel and a rake for each of them, told him that he looked pale. 

*

And then, Newt.

The Scamander boy - a young man even older than Credence, really - was Newt. The lanky one with the wind-swept hair, the soft, freckled face and wide mouth that made Credence think of terrible things, things he would never have dared to do even in London, where he had dared too much. Newt was an odd one, a draft dodger, a dropout from one of the big universities who spent most of his time in the stables with his mother’s horses. He had a habit of walking through the house with a book in front of his face, or through the garden with a long stick, where he was often followed by Credence, who worshipped him.

He’s a good boy and a poor influence, his mother had said one evening after they’d come in from mucking the stalls. Newt had thundered up as he always did to the top of the landing and stopped. Credence watched his head turn to catch the rest, his expression darkening even as the light caught his face at an angle, making his hair red: He’s a clever clogs and too clever by half, but you’re a good egg, Credence. You must try and convince him to enlist.

When they were alone, they never discussed the war, and they stayed away from any topic more intimate than the weather, the horses, or the zoological studies Newt planned to undertake on an island somewhere far off and sweltering. They worked in their shirtsleeves, Newt’s pushed half up his slender arms, revealing freckles. Sometimes they spent hours on the subject of the distant island, what it would look like and what sorts of animals he would find when he got there. His interest lie in documenting and protecting the existence of certain species endangered by humans. Humans were a terrible hazard to everyone, even themselves, according to Newt. At that, he gave a meaningful nod to Credence, who pretended not to understand.

Newt never asked about Ma. They did not discuss anything like that. Conversation with him was all-at-once or not at all, and Credence, preferring the all-at-once, let him decide everything. He was happy to listen, to follow, to look at the things that Newt wanted to show him, whatever they were. On the days when he was in a mood, there was nothing. They worked until they were both red-faced and then went walking along the strand behind the house, leaving their muddy boots by the stable door to dry.

Behind the house was a long line of hedges with wide, flat leaves separating the garden and the green field where the horses grazed from the wilder terrain of the beach, its sand dunes and chalk cliffs. They were just beyond the town, where the stone houses clustered narrower together and the rolling green hills were replaced by traffic signs. They did not go in this direction, but in the opposite one, towards the chalk cliffs and the beaches beneath those, where Newt taught him to keep an eye on the tide while they dug up clams and cockles and chased small fish with the tips of their fingers through the little pools that collected when the sea contracted into itself in the afternoon.

The beach was the best spot for an all-at-once. Even though it was still summer, the water was too cold for casual swimming, and they didn’t come for the clams alone, but for Newt to drag his fingertips through the hard-packed sand beside the water to make letter shapes of all kinds and the sounds that went with them.

It’s not shameful to be illiterate, he said, you shouldn’t be ashamed, and Credence said, Stop, please.

They did all the letter sounds, instead. _Ess_ \- seaside. Seagull, _guh_ _._ _Cuh_ \- Credence, clams, cockles. At that word, Credence always had to look away, rub his hands together, thrust his fist into the wet sand.

Sometimes, at the beach especially, he felt like a new Credence, all the filth of London baked off him by the sun. He felt bleached in a violent way. Like the yellow spot seared onto the inside of his eyelid when he’d stared at the bright windowpane for too long. They always stayed for hours at the beach, writing letters, talking about nothing. Credence had never spent time with a boy or a man his own age before, not in any meaningful kind of way. He had never sat together anywhere, enjoying together the rare warmth of the sun, the view, the smell of the sea, which smelled like Newt. He wondered if it was like this for girls. Sometimes he thought that Newt looked at him, too, but he told himself not to be silly. He would make it dirty again, imagining things like that.

Other times, he was sure that London clung to him like the dirt beneath his fingernail, horse stall dreck; he wished he could contract into himself, like the sea.

He thought that Newt knew but was too kind to say or to use the kinds of words that other people might have used. Newt never said anything when Credence stared, and in his silence, they talked a lot. Usually about seabirds or the novels which Newt had read as a boy at school and was now certain that Credence would enjoy when he could finally read them. They talked about the family cat, too, and the horses and bees and the ways that bees talked.

They have a secret language, Newt said. When I was a little boy, I used to play my pan flute to them. I thought that I could match the notes to their flying, and they’d follow me.

Credence paused in his comparison of the spidery _kuh_ in 'kite' and the smaller, curled one in 'cat _'._ He pressed his chin into his shoulder, considering. I don’t think I’d like to be followed by bees.

They wouldn’t sting you, Newt said tossing sand as he sat up. He tossed more until Credence looked, startled, back at him. Pressed his wide lips together so that they wrinkled straight across a freckle. Really, he said. If you could work out their language enough to tell them you meant no harm, I don’t think that they would sting you at all.


End file.
